The Second Visit Rule
· 1 min read
Plant-based menus are frequently the newest part of a kitchen. Judging them on a single visit is judging the worst version you will ever be served.
New dishes take a kitchen weeks to settle. Timings are wrong, seasoning drifts, and the person who developed it is not always the person cooking it on a Tuesday. This is true of everything on a menu, but plant-based dishes are disproportionately the newest, which means they take the disproportionate share of the first-visit disappointment.
The rule is simple: if the room was good and the dish was not, go back once. Order the same thing. Two bad versions of one dish is data; one is noise. And if the second is markedly better, you have found a kitchen that is improving, which is worth more than one that has been coasting at a slightly higher level for a decade.
What not to give a second chance
Two things do not improve: a room where the question annoyed someone, and a kitchen that could not tell you what was in its own food. Neither is about the dish, and neither gets better on a Tuesday.
Everything else deserves the second look, including the coffee. If you liked the place enough to be reading about it afterwards, the odds are good that the problem was a bad night rather than a bad room — and the cost of finding out is one more visit to somewhere you already wanted to like.
